


Let Me Love You

by yikesola



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1950s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 09:01:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19903186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yikesola/pseuds/yikesola
Summary: Dan opens his bedroom door and sees a little white square of notebook paper lying on his pillow. He reads Phil’s scrawled handwriting,“Sorry to miss you Danny, I’m stopping by Franklins before class. Meet me for a malt shake tonight, usual time?”An au fic about postcards and milkshakes.





	Let Me Love You

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Phandom Reverse Bang](http://phandomreversebang.tumblr.com/), based off of [penisdinosaur](http://penisdinosaur.tumblr.com/)'s beautiful artwork, and betaed by the very patient [daffphildil](http://daffphildil.tumblr.com/).

There is mud on Dan’s shoes as he enters the front door to his boarding house. That’s gonna infuriate his landlady, he thinks, but he doesn’t regret taking the shortcut through the park on his way back from class. Dan hoped to catch Phil before he left for his last lecture of the day. He wanted to see what Phil thought of the postcard from Emily Miller currently held in his hand.

The old familiar name drums in his brain with his muddy footsteps on the stairs — _Em’ly Mill-er Em’ly Mill-er_ — but it flies out of his head when he opens his bedroom door and sees a little white square of notebook paper lying on his pillow. 

He picks up the notebook paper and reads Phil’s scrawled handwriting. His penmanship is awful; he’s too reliant on his fancy noiseless typewriter. Dan teases him about it constantly.

The note reads, _“Sorry to miss you Danny, I’m stopping by Franklins before class. Meet me for a malt shake tonight, usual time?”_ Dan tries not to let it sting that Phil chose Franklins Bookshop over him for the afternoon, but the promise of a malt shake at their usual diner makes up for it. He’s fond of these little traditions. 

He looks at Phil’s note in his left hand, then to the postcard still held in his right. 

Emily Miller’s handwriting blows Phil’s out of the water. It’s neat and tiny but not at all cramped; it all fits fine on the limited space. Still, the message itself isn’t nearly as intimate or familiar as Phil’s, until the last line: _“Florida is too hot, even this time of year. Mum’s health is improving, but I still hope she’ll get homesick around Christmas and we can get back to England. I’d like to see you if we do. New Year’s Eve in London? How about it, Dan, be my last kiss of 1959? —Emily Miller”_

He hasn’t seen Emily since long before he moved for uni. Not since she herself moved to America late last spring. And so much has changed since then. But he’s known her almost all his life.

They aren’t sweethearts. Never were. 

He barely remembers the night when they were fifteen years old and they had both spilled their greatest secret to each other. He was blind drunk and crying cold with so much fear when the confession came out of him, that he remembers being amazed she heard him at all. But she did hear him. 

And she smiled that gentle Emily Miller smile she deserves to be famous for. Then she said, “It’s the same for me. Well, not exactly the same. But,” and Dan remembers how her voice shook, “you understand, don’t you, Dan?” 

He shook his head, and being as drunk as he was the movement made the room spin. 

“We’re both… nonconforming,” she said as she leaned against his shoulder. 

The feeling at her words and their meaning was overwhelming; the tears were still streaming down Dan’s face but now they were of pure relief. 

The two of them queer, the two of them _wanting_ — despite every cue in the world telling them not to, two pillars standing together in the wide frightening world. There were others, surely. Hidden in plain sight. But to feel so alone one moment, and to know that your friend is sharing your boat the next... 

Yes, Dan thinks, yes Emily Miller, it’s been far too long since they danced. 

He can picture clearly what she’d look like bent over a desk trying not to misspell on the postcard. She has freckles so small he can only see them when she stands a little too close, and high sharp cheekbones. She has bright blue eyes and dark, dark hair. She has a big smile, and soft-looking lips. She is clumsy and kind. 

Strange, he thinks, how someone with a lot of those very same features has caught his eye. 

Someone who, in addition to those features, is a hair taller than him, with broad shoulders and stubble in the mornings. He knows all about this someone in the mornings— all about their stubble, and their gruff voice, and the blind grasps they make for their glasses on the bedside table. He knows because it’s Dan’s bedside table too; it sits perched between their two beds in the room they share at the boarding house under the watchful eye of Ms. Penton. 

It's their best option; neither of them have family they can stay with here in York while attending university, and renting at Ms. Penton’s has better meals than submitting to the whims of campus. Phil hasn’t lived in the halls in years, not since his own first year. 

Taking the place of a friend of a friend who was graduating and couldn’t share the room anymore was Dan’s favourite moment of happenstance, even if he doesn’t believe in it or in fate or in destiny, just in the universe’s infinite capability for randomness. 

Somehow, he’s not willing to question how or why, he and Phil found each other. 

Dan lays on his own bed with his muddy shoes hanging off the end. He holds both messages and closes his eyes as the tiredness of listening to law lectures all day rolls over his shoulders. He really hopes Emily will be back in England by New Year’s Eve. He knows Phil’s going to be his last kiss of 1959, but he still wants Emily and Phil to know each other. 

The two people that make him feel less alone. 

When he wakes up from his unintended nap, that feeling of aloneness has crept back into his bones because the sun has set and the room around him is dark. There’s no other breathing except his own, and he’s grown accustomed over the last few months to a second body in the tiny space. 

He glances at his watch and has half a heart attack at the time. He’s not late to meeting Phil at the diner, but he nearly is, and the dried mud cracks off onto the stairs as he runs out. He’s running so fast that he doesn’t even notice Ms. Penton had cleaned up the mud stains earlier as he napped. 

“Take a gander, Danny boy,” Phil says smiling when Dan opens the diner door. He’s sitting at their usual booth, and he looks so damn good beaming up at him that Dan’s heart rate can no longer be blamed on his haste, he thinks. It’s all for Phil, who is holding up a book with a red cover. It has a man and a rocket ship on it, and looks like the kind of book Phil would fall into for days, reading voraciously until every last word was swallowed up. “ _Northwest of Earth_ by C.L. Moore,” he goes on, “limited American printing but I pulled a few strings and got my hands on one.” 

“Pulled a few strings? You mean made puppy eyes at Lily until she ordered it for you?” Dan tried to tease, tried not to sound jealous of the bird who works inventory over at Franklins Bookshop and makes sheep’s eyes at Phil whenever he’s in there.

Phil grins. “Maybe… they only printed 4,000 copies, Dan! Everyone in New York would’ve snatched it up before it jumped across the pond. Desperate times call for desperate measures, you know.” 

“And I guess you’ll have your nose buried in that book for the next week, paying me no mind, huh?” 

“It’ll be no worse than when Lonnie Donegan’s new album came out and you just spent days laying on the floor by the record player, listening to it over and over and shushing me whenever I tried to say anything at all.”

Dan slips his jacket off to help hide his smile. “Anyone ever tell you you’re unfair, Lester?” 

“You, most days,” Phil laughs. 

The laughter is easy; it always is with them. It’s the easiest thing in their tangled lives. They can laugh in public; they can laugh without a care for who sees them. They can laugh and revel in how they love the sound, love the way it creases the other person’s eyes, love the fact that they were the cause of all this laughter in the first place. When they cannot reach across the table to thread their fingers together or pick a sweetheart song on the jukebox to dance to, when they cannot kiss hello though they haven’t seen each other all day long, they can at least laugh. 

Dan lets the laughter suffice for the kiss he’d want to give Phil for that jealousy which still lingers at Lily having gotten Phil something he wanted. Dan wants to be able to give Phil little gifts, to have Phil give him puppy eyes or bat his lashes until Dan gives in. But when does a fellow buy another bloke a gift? Christmas, if they insist. His wedding day, if he’s part of the stag night. Never just because, never a gift that says _I was thinking about you, thought you might like this._

He does what he can, of course. He buys a vanilla malt shake for them to share and a basket of chips. It says enough, he hopes. 

Dan pulls out Emily’s postcard from his coat pocket. He’s gabbed enough about Emily over the months for Phil to feel genuine excitement at the idea of meeting her on New Year’s Eve. Dan feels so warm at Phil’s excitement. He’s not sure he’s allowed to feel this happy. 

The song playing on the jukebox ends; it had been something Phil picked out while waiting for Dan. Now Phil fiddled with the stripped straw on their malt shake and looked back and forth between Dan and the jukebox. 

“Go pick out a song for me, Danny,” Phil laughs. He leans close across the table and near whispers his next request, “Play something we’d dance to if we were alone.” 

Dan stands and flips through the song selection. That’s a pretty tall order, considering neither of them dance very much. Still, he finds a nice little number, pays his 5p, and turns to see Phil’s face light up as the opening notes of Mabel Mercer’s “Let Me Love You” fills the diner. 

Dan isn’t expecting the sadness that shadows Phil’s face as the lyrics croon on, begging, _“Let me love you, let me show that I do, Let me do a million impossible things so you'll know that I do.”_ He was expecting a little kick to his shin after he sat back down at the table. He was expecting Phil to laugh, to smile, to maybe even blush a little and call Dan a sentimental sap. Instead Phil looks like Dan’s been teasing him, and not in the way that they usually tease and laugh and move along— he looks like Dan’s been punching his sore spots, worsening bruises that already exist. When the song is over, Phil doesn’t say a thing. Just sips at the malt shake they’d come here to share. 

Phil stands and mumbles something about stepping into the loo, but Dan hardly hears him over the alarm bells going off in his brain. 

He can’t bear looking at the empty booth across from him any longer and swivels his head to look around at the empty diner. Their waitress, Darla, is leaning against the counter and chatting with the cook through their little window. They both look bored out of their minds. They aren’t paying Dan or Phil the slightest attention. Yet he feels like there’s a spotlight on him: look, look everybody, Dan fucked up again! 

When Phil comes back, he doesn’t look so sad. That helps a little, with Dan’s rising anxiety, but it doesn’t stop him wondering where he’d gone wrong. 

“Wanna take the long walk home?” Phil asks, “Through the park, breathe some night air?” 

Dan nods. What’s more mud on his shoes? On the stairs? None of it matters if Phil is upset with him. 

He goes to the counter to settle their bill while Phil slurps the rest of their shake, complaining about brain freeze immediately afterwards. He’s so goddamn endearing that every cell in Dan’s body is fighting against the urge to kiss Phil til his brain warms up again. 

“I didn’t mean to be a sourpuss,” Phil says after they’ve walked a block and a half. 

“You weren’t,” Dan says, because what else is he supposed to say? 

“It was the song.” 

Dan shrugs. “I thought it might be.” 

“It’s just… it’s not a fair song, Dan.” Phil’s steps slow. 

They’re perfectly between street lamps, in the arm’s length of darkness. Phil utilizes that cloak of darkness by reaching for Dan’s hand, pulling it quickly to his lips for a kiss across his knuckles, then letting it fall again to his side. It was so brief, and rushed, their moment of tenderness. Frightfully public, but calculated to be safe enough. 

Phil continues walking. “You think I don’t wanna let you love me? I’m hardly the one standing in our way here…” 

“I know that,” Dan says, “I _know_ that. I didn’t mean anything by it.” 

“You didn’t?” 

“No,” Dan shakes his head. “What, you thought I chose that song to be a passive aggressive twat?” 

“I was afraid you might’ve…” 

There’s a lot Dan wants to say, some sort of declaration about the changes he’s gonna fight for when he’s a lawyer and about the bright future they have to look forward to which looks only like the most optimistic of those sci-fi books Phil eats up. To set aside the nihilist persona all the other folks at school see him wearing. To be honest and hopeful with Phil, because it looks like Phil needs that kind of honesty and hope right now. 

It wouldn’t be anything new for him to say. Only new part would be that he’d be saying it in public, as opposed to in the safety of behind closed doors in their boarding house. And sure, it’s quiet right now… it’s the middle of the night and no one is around. 

But he has enough instinctual self-preservation to know that Phil kissing his knuckles was the bravest declaration either one of them ought to attempt. 

Still, maybe the least he could do is mimic it. 

He takes a quick glance over his shoulder, listens sharply for any footsteps that don’t belong to either him or Phil, and waits for them to approach another gap between streetlights. When they’re in that hanging hesitation of darkness again, he stops walking. Phil mirrors him, as though it’s instinctual. Dan reaches for his cool hand, which fits so perfectly in his own large warm one. It’s soft and smooth and the palm feels so right against his lips even if he only holds it there for the length of a breath. Phil doesn’t say anything, but watches Dan as closely as he can in the dark. 

“Let’s get a chocolate malt next time,” Dan says. 

“Alright,” Phil nods. 

They start walking again, soon under the light of a lamp above. “And I’m getting more dips,” Dan continues. “A chip in the shake is fine but I really feel like I’m missing out on the wide world of condiments.” 

“You get whatever you like,” Phil smiles, “Just don’t expect me to do the ordering if it’s something crazy like ‘one of every dip you have, please!’ because I’m not dealing with the look on poor Darla’s face.” 

Dan does Phil the courtesy of not pointing out that he always does the ordering anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading— come say hi on [tumblr](http://yikesola.tumblr.com/post/186454844039/let-me-love-you) !
> 
> Here’s a [link](http://penisdinosaur.tumblr.com/post/186460978506/another-thing-for-the-phandomreversebang-this) to the amazing artwork, and a [post](http://yikesola.tumblr.com/post/186455582914/yikesola-a-bonus-feature-of-the-song-dan-plays-on) with the song Dan plays on the jukebox.


End file.
